Today your website is an important part of your marketing strategy. Gulf Interactive specialise in creating inspiring websites with a focus on user needs.  Whatever your requirements, our creative team will ensure a user-focused website designed to inform and educate your visitors, and to set you apart from your competitors.

Gulf Interactive are the digital experts you need. We are able to discuss, design, and suggest the way forward to meet your requirements. Our enthusiastic staff work extremely hard to build and manage each successful element of our client websites, ensuring that branding, design, content and technology integrate seamlessly, and are that our designs that are focused on your users and their experience.

Web accessibility for all is paramount in our designers' thinking when creating a website. We firmly believe that building accessible websites should be the norm and not the exception.

One way you can help us to create the site that you want is to ensure that we receive a good selection of well-chosen, client-specific assets at an early stage in the site development. Assets include your corporate branding, logos, corporate colours, images, videos, brochures and perhaps content, in fact anything that will help us to fully understand the correct tone and feel for your website.

We take pride in our design process as it encourages client participation, whilst allowing every opportunity for us to create the very best designs.

Our technical team are experts in Content Management Systems. We have been working with these since 1997 and in fact we created one of the first browser based CMSs available.

Our recommended CMS, ‘Sitefinity’, allows your non-expert web editors to maintain and develop your website using a simple Microsoft Office style interface that they are familiar. We are able to restrict user access so that certain web editors only have access to certain areas of the website, right down to a page level. Editing and publishing can be separated between two roles, so that all changes can be checked and approved prior to being published. In fact the system is so simple that a child can easily learn it, yet so powerful that it meets the needs of the most discerning clients

Gulf Interactive can also create special modules and applications that range in complexity from image and video libraries, through events calendars and media centres, and on to webcasts, streaming media and other Web 2.0 applications. These modules can be developed and added to your website during the initial build, or post-launch to suit your needs and budget. We are happy to advise on the best possible way to get you to where you want to be on-line.

At Gulf Interactive we are firm believers in the value of workshops to help large organizations develop a strategic roadmap that lays out their on-line strategy for the coming two to three years. Each of your internal departments will have differing requirements – HR will probably want to see on-line job applications, Finance will want to see on-line financial information available to trusted third-parties within a secure password protected area, PR will want to see a Media section with press releases and media information, Marketing will want to see promotional tools implemented on-line, whilst Head Office will be interested in posting annual reports and CSR information. In an ideal world budgets would allow all requirements to be implemented at once, but in reality a prioritised phased approach is more usual. Our strategic workshops focus upon how these key departments and employees view the role of company website, how they would like to see it developed, what is urgent and what can be considered ‘Phase 2’, and so sets out to determine the roadmap for the future.

The workshop is a creative, thought provoking and an informative process that is led by an experienced strategist/facilitator. Each qualitative workshop involves small teams of employees who become participants in colourful, paper-based tasks and brain-storming activities. The results from each team exercise are displayed, and a discussion on the findings is led by the facilitator, who encourages feedback from all the participants equally. This methodology encourages open discussion and blue-sky thinking.

A presentation of the results, by the facilitator to senior management allows for open evaluation and discussion on the findings. The outcome is an in depth understanding of both user and corporate expectations for the website.

The result is a balanced and unbiased proposal for an exciting, accessible and effective website design that has a defined development path allowing planned growth in the coming years.

Availability and Security are key when it comes to website hosting.

A broken or unavailable website takes value away from your business once customers are unable to source the information they require, or follow up your latest news and initiatives. Tempting as it may be, web hosting is not something that you should take in-house. It is a specialised service that requires a great deal of expertise and experience to successfully maintain and operate on a 24x7 basis.

Gulf Interactive's technical team program our websites to make them quick and easy to download and navigate and therefore exceptionally user-friendly.  Extensive website testing locates and eliminates any problems before the site goes live, ensuring that it both looks good and functions effectively, attracting the maximum number of visitors.

Our web hosting services cater for the very best in quality, speed, redundancy, reliability and flexibility using the Amazon Cloud . This robust, ultra-modern environment offers a minimum of 99.9% uptime, with great security and built in redundancy and resilience. We can even offer global load-balancing with ‘CloudFront’ web services allowing very high usage websites an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds and at a very cost effective rate.

We would be please to discuss your requirements in detail so that we can configure the best possible solution for your needs.

Our recommended CMS, ‘Sitefinity’, allows your non-expert web editors to maintain and develop your website using a simple Office based controls that they are familiar. We are able to restrict your web editors to certain areas of the website, right down to a page level. Editing and publishing can be separated between two roles so that all changes are checked before being published. In fact the system is so simple that a child can quickly learn it, yet so powerful that it meets the needs of the most discerning clients.

However our experience ranges across a multitude of possible CMS solutions and we are happy work with any CMS that you may wish to use.

Information, communication and entertainment are the reasons why web users visit sites, and why they later return.  It is vitally important therefore to ensure that site content is clearly and concisely written, and delivers your website messages clearly and effectively to your visitors.

Our understanding of how people use the internet equips our in-house copywriters to write for your specified target audiences, both in your preferred tone and preferred style.

A key part of the future success of any the website will be the ongoing creation of new content on a regular basis, and we are able to advise you on how best to approach this challenge, whether by use of our copywriters or by the establishment your own in-house web team.

Gulf Interactive has resources available to provide translation services for your website content. We provide expert English to Arabic and Arabic to English translations and can offer a service for all major languages, including Chinese, in either direction, i.e. French to Arabic, Arabic to Chinese, French to Chinese and so on.

Please contact us with your exact requirements.

Creating a search engine friendly site is a priority from the beginning of the design phase through to content entry for all our websites. Unfortunately, the simple use of Meta Tags is no longer any guarantee of a ranking in search engine results - in fact most search engines now ignore Meta Tags completely.

At Gulf Interactive we provide the following services:

	Consultation and advise to clients on a suitable marketing strategy
	Implementation of SEO across our website builds
	Advice to ensure your site ranks highly in keyword searches
	Use of Google Analytics to track and report on site traffic
	Analysis of the usage statistics to monitor and suggest improvements
	Content auditing, development and smoothing

We are also able to advise you on creating Search Engine Marketing campaigns. SEM involves purchasing keywords on sites such as Google or Yahoo!, or the purchase of banner ads on other sites, ranging from local sites such as Qatar Living to global sites like YouTube. Whilst SEM can be an expensive to implement the results can prove very worthwhile, but whether you use SEM will depend upon your marketing budget and strategy.